In an unusual move, Pluralsight has announced that it filed confidentially for IPO. Companies typically stay quiet until they make the filings public, unless reporters break the news first.

But it’s no surprise to those who have been following Utah’s tech scene that Pluralsight is planning to list on the stock market this year. The venture-backed “unicorn” has been a late-stage company for several years now.

Co-founder and CEO Aaron Skonnard built the foundations of the education technology business back in 2004. Like many startups outside of Silicon Valley, it bootstrapped its business and didn’t raise significant outside funding until 2013.

Then it raised at least three rounds, nearing $200 million in financing. Insight Venture Partners, Felicis Ventures and ICONIQ Capital are amongst its backers.

It’s a competitive market, but Pluralsight has built a big business around online software development courses, helping people hone their skills in categories like IT, data and security.

Small businesses and large enterprises pay Pluralsight to help train their employees. Individuals can also subscribe to its services.

It is unclear when Pluralsight will complete the IPO. The release said that “the initial public offering is expected to commence after the SEC completes its review process, subject to market and other conditions.”

Companies often remain on file confidentially for several months, reviewing and perfecting their prospectus. Once the filing is unveiled, companies must wait 15 days before the investor roadshow, and typically go public the week after that.

There has been a flurry of IPO activity in recent weeks, particularly in the enterprise technology category. Dropbox recently went public and Spotify is listing Tuesday. Other companies that have submitted filings include DocuSign, Zuora, Smartsheet and Pivotal.

After a slow first quarter, it is expected to be a busy spring for tech IPOs.

This report from Business Insider covers the recent spate in IPO activity from software companies such as Smartsheet, Pivotal, DocuSign, ZScaler, and Zuora. For this week’s posts, click on the...

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Sramana Mitra: One last question, which is another trend. I would say it’s less visible. We are in 2017. Lots of stuff have already been built. Especially if you’re B2B investors, there aren’t that...

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Sramana Mitra: Concur is one of the best examples of replacing paper. That has built a very valuable company. It went public on its own. It made the shift from being a license software company to a...

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Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to productize everything? When you got this $100,000 plus deal, was it already productized? Mack Sundaram: We were about 70% there. It was something that they...

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Sramana Mitra: VC firms are raising huge amounts of capital. The management fees are so big. They don’t really need to deliver any returns. They are just sitting and becoming fat with fat management...

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Sramana Mitra: SaaS continues to be bigger because there is a lot more software adoption happening all over the world. Last week, we had a session that was focused on what’s happening on the Indian...

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Ben Mathias, Managing Partner at Vertex Ventures, India, discusses the trends and dynamics of the Indian startup eco-system, including exits. India needs exits at this point, even if they’re...

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Sramana Mitra: How did you get this off the ground? Mack Sundaram: Being in a sales role, I had the privilege of having worked with companies. I personally have to find ways to solve this problem of...

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Uber is closing the doors on its on-demand package delivery service for merchants, RUSH, in New York City, San Francisco and Chicago, TechCrunch has learned. In an email to users, Uber said it plans to close RUSH operations June 30, 2018.

“At Uber, we believe in making big bold bets, and while ending UberRUSH comes with some sadness, we will continue our mission of building reliable technology that serves people and cities all over the world,” Uber’s NYC RUSH team wrote to customers.

Uber has since confirmed the wind-down.

“We’re winding down UberRUSH deliveries and ending services by the end of June,” an Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We’re thankful for our partners and hope the next three months will allow them to make arrangements for their delivery needs. We’re already applying a lot of the lessons we learned together to our UberEats food delivery business in over 200 global markets across more than 100,000 restaurants.”

With UberRUSH, which I forgot still existed, people can request deliveries for items no more than 30 pounds in size, except animals, alcohol, illegal items, stolen goods and dangerous items like guns and explosives. Last April, Uber stopped providing courier services to restaurants, encouraging them to instead use UberEATS, the company’s food delivery service. The shutdown of UberRUSH comes shortly after Shyp, an on-demand shipping company, announced its last day of operations.

A company called Clipisode is today launching a new service that’s essentially a “talk show in a box,” as founder Brian Alvey describes it. Similar to how Anchor now allows anyone to build a professional podcast using simple mobile and web tools, Clipisode does this for video content. With Clipisode, you can record a video that can be shared across any platform – social media, the web, text messages – and collect video responses that can then be integrated into the “show” and overlaid with professional graphics.

The video responses feature is something more akin to a video voicemail-based call-in feature.

Here’s how it works. The content creator will first use Clipisode to record their video, and receive the link to share the video across social media, the web, or privately through email, text messaging, etc. When the viewer or guest clicks the link, they can respond to the question the show’s “host” posed.

For example, a reporter could ask for viewers’ thoughts on an issue or a creator could ask their fans what they want to see next.

How the video creator wants to use this functionality is really up to them, and specific to the type of video show they’re making.

To give you an idea, during a pre-launch period, the app has been tested by AXS TV to promote their upcoming Top Ten Revealed series by asking music industry experts “Who Is Your All-time Favorite Guitarist?”

BBC Scotland asked their Twitter followers who they want to see hired as the new manager for the Scotland national football team.

A full-time Twitch gamer, Chris Melberger asked his subscribers what device they watch Twitch on.

The content creator can then receive all the video responses to these questions privately, choose which ones they want to include in their finished show, and drag those responses into the order they want. The creator can respond back to the clips, too, or just add another clip at the end of their video. Uploading pre-recorded clips from services like Dropbox or even your phone is supported as well.

Plus, content creators can use Clipisode to overlay professional-looking animations and graphics on top of the final video with the responses and replies. This makes it seem more like something made with help from a video editing team, not an app on your phone.

Because Clipisode invitations are web links, they don’t require the recipients to download an app.

“[People] don’t want to download an app for a one-time video reply,” explains Alvey. “But with this, people can reply.” And, he adds, what makes Clipisode interesting from a technical perspective, is that the web links users click to reply can work in any app in a way that feels seamless to the end user.

“That’s our biggest trick – making this work in other people’s apps, so there’s no new social network to join and nothing to download,” he says.

The app is free currently, but the plan is to generate revenue by later selling subscription access to the authoring suite where users can create the animated overlays and branding components that give the video the professional look-and-feel.

In an online CMS, creators can author, test and deploy animated themes that run on top of their videos.

The final video product can be shared back to social media, or downloaded as a video file to be published on video-sharing sites, social media, or as a video podcast.

Clipisode has been in development for some time, Alvey says. The company originally raised less than a million from investors including Mike Jones and Mark Cuban for a different product the founder describes as a Patreon competitor, before pivoting to Clipisode. Investors funded the new product with less than half a million.

The app itself took a couple of years to complete, something that Alvey says has to do with the animation studio it includes and the small team. (It’s just him and technical co-founder Max Schmeling.)

Clipisode is a free download on iOS and Android.

Whenever you are doing something online that requires you to present an official ID like a passport or driver’s license to complete the transaction, it presents risk to both parties. Consumers want to know they are secure and brands want to know the person is using valid credentials. That’s where Veriff comes in.

Kaarel Kotkas, CEO and founder of the company, says the goal is to be “the Stripe of identity .” What he means is he wants to provide developers with the ability to embed identity verification into any application or website, as easily as you can use Stripe to add payments.

The company, which was originally launched in Estonia in 2015, is a recent graduate of the Y Combinator winter class. When you undertake any activity on the web or a mobile app that requires a valid ID, if Veriff is running under the hood, you can submit an ID such as a driver’s license. It uses a secret sauce to determine that the ID being presented is an officially issued one and that it belongs to the person in question.

When you consider that there were over 15 million identity thefts in the US in 2016 alone, you know it’s not a simple matter to identify a forgery. Fake IDs can be quite good and it’s often difficult to identify fraudulent ones with the naked eye.

If you want to open a bank account online for instance, you have to provide proof of identity for the bank. With Veriff, you take a picture of yourself, then submit a picture of your official ID and Veriff analyzes it to make sure it’s valid.

The idea is to make the ID process easy and quick for the consumer, while providing an accurate way for the brand to check IDs online. Consumers also benefit because someone can’t use their identity online to get credit or other services.

If there is an issue with the ID, the person can be directed to a human for a video chat where they can discuss it if need be.

The company currently has 20 customers and is on track to do $100,000 in revenue this month, according to data they provided at their Y Combinator Demo Day presentation. They plan to make money by charging $1 per verification.

ClearVoice recently launched a new feature to give freelancers a better way to show off their work and get new jobs.

CV Portfolios offer an easier alternative to personal websites that are often sparsely populated, out-of-date or otherwise neglected.

Thanks a technology that the company is calling VoiceGraph, writers no longer have to keep the pages updated themselves. Instead, co-founder and CEO Joe Griffin said VoiceGraph indexes stories from the top publishers online (about 250,000 currently) and matches them to their authors. It also aggregates metrics around social sharing and connecting to the authors’ own social media accounts.

“At the end of the day, what we want to do here is give freelancers very robust tools that make it as simple as possible to address one of the biggest hurdles freelancers were having: creating a portfolio and maintaining it,” Griffin said.

So for example, you can visit my CV Portfolio to see many of my latest TechCrunch articles. Granted, that’s not that so exciting, since you can do the same thing on my TechCrunch author page, but this could be pretty useful if I was a freelancer with a variety of publishers, or if I wanted to highlight articles I wrote for past employers.

There were around 400,000 automatically generated CV Portfolios at launch. Authors can claim their profiles, then edit them by creating new sections, moving articles around, deleting work that they’re not proud of, adding links or uploading files. And again, it’s a lot easier because they’re starting with a portfolio that’s already populated and automatically updated with new stories.

(And yes, if you’re a freelancer with an automatically generated portfolio that you don’t want on ClearVoice, Griffin said you can just delete it.)

The product is free. Sure, you can can use your CV Portfolio to promote yourself on ClearVoice’s talent marketplace, where freelancers get hired by companies to help with content marketing. But Griffin said he’s perfectly fine if people just want to create CV Portfolios and don’t participate in the market at all.

Sramana Mitra: If you have to make 500 micro-VC funds productive, there needs to be some of these segmentation and clear definition. Otherwise, nobody will find anybody. It’s going to be constantly...

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Sramana Mitra: Am I hearing that when you look back on EchoSign, you feel that you sold too early? Jason Lemkin: I think it was a lucrative and fair financial transaction. What I didn’t realize until...

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Nift, which is giving local businesses a new way to promote themselves, has raised $16.5 million in Series A funding.

The businesses that work with Nift (the name is short for “neighborhood gift”) can give special gift cards to their best customers. Those customers enter their codes on the Nift website, answer a few questions and can then choose from two free gifts from other local businesses.

Founder and CEO Elery Pfeffer suggested that this can help smaller businesses stay competitive against Amazon, while avoiding some of the pitfalls of promoting themselves through discount sites like Groupon. For one thing, Pfeffer argued that the person receiving the Nift is “somebody else’s best customer — this is not a bargain hunter motivated by a deal.”

“They’re getting a gift they weren’t expecting,” he said. “We make the selection for them, so there’s no self-selecting bargain hunting going on. That’s what makes the whole thing work.”

The idea is that businesses get new customers in exchange for promoting other merchants. It’s up to each merchant to determine what makes someone their best customer and how many Nift cards they want to give out, but Pfeffer (a data scientist who previously founded influencer marketing company Pursway) said his team has built sophisticated tools to find “the perfect match” between customers and gifts.

This approach has already been pretty successful in Boston, where the company says 250,000 customers have activated more than 500,000 Nift cards. Pfeffer said 86 percent of those customers end up receiving a gift from a business that they’ve either never visited or haven’t visited in the past year. Afterwards, 88 percent of customers said they’re interested in visiting the business again, and a month later, 37 percent have actually done so.

The new funding comes from Spark Capital, Foundry Group and Accomplice and will fuel the startup’s plans to expand to five new markets (in addition to Boston, it’s currently available in Providence and Washington, D.C.).

“Retail has changed dramatically with the widespread adoption of e-commerce, but something has been missing for small businesses at the local level,” said Foundry Group’s Seth Levine in the funding announcement. “Nift is providing a way for merchants to deliver the experiences customers want, while fostering a healthy ecosystem. The success of the platform illustrates the impact it’s already having in strengthening these businesses and revitalizing communities.”

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 393rd FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, April 5, 2018, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register...

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Roam, a San Francisco-based robotics startup, has just debuted a lower-body robotic exoskeleton aimed firmly at skiers. The company’s first product doesn’t stray too far from nearby Ekso Bionics, where CEO and founder Tim Swift worked previously — though the simply titled Robotic Ski Exoskeleton trades warehouse work and mobility assistance for the admittedly more exhilarating world of downhill skiing.

The product is essentially a pair of braces that strap on the wearer’s thighs, connecting to ski boots on one side and a small backpack on the other. The braces absorb shock, provide support and generally make you look like some crazy cyborg sent back from the future to punish snow.

A combination of built-in sensors and software adjust the system’s fabric and air actuators, providing additional support to the quadriceps. That all happens automatically, though users can also opt to control the thing manually, as well.

In spite of only announcing this week, the company says its “first releases are already spoken for,” meaning interested parties will have to join a waiting list to get their hands on it. And that’s honestly probably perfectly fine as they’re only available in the U.S. for now, and spring is finally upon us.

When they are more widely available, they’ll run somewhere in the ballpark of $2,000 to $2,500. Pricey, but no one ever said skiing — or being a robot — was going to be an affordable hobby.